Wolfram|Alpha – Flummoxed by an Apostrophe

Wolfram Alpha is the hot new search engine. Of course I searched for “Eric Burke” first, and found nothing.

Next, I searched for my city and state (O’Fallon, MO) as shown here:

OK, that didn’t work. Let’s try removing the apostrophe:

As you can see, it worked. Oddly, their own “Input Interpretation” displayed the city name with the apostrophe. They just won’t let you search that way.

See also: Apostrophe Abuse.

Posted on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 7:22 am in Bugs, Technology.